Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) — China will start building about 15 national logistics hubs this year in its bid to build a nation-wide logistics hub network.
In principle, The national logistics hubs will be built on existent logistics hubs which have a sound infrastructure, strong market demand and huge growth potential, according to an implementation plan released by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Transport.
The two ministries will determine the locations of the first batch of national logistics hubs based on the demand of the development under national strategies like the Yangtze River economic belt and local government plans.
China aims to build about 30 national logistics hubs by 2020, and 150 by 2025, when the ratio of total logistics expenses to GDP will be reduced to about 12 percent.
The country’s logistics volume totaled 283.1 trillion yuan (42.14 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2018, up 6.4 percent year on year. The ratio of total logistics expenses to GDP stood at 14.8 percent.
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) — Mobile payment is gaining steam in China’s rural areas, strengthening its dominant position in online payment in rural areas, according to the country’s central bank.
A total of 274.883 billion mobile payment transactions were made via non-banking payment platforms in 2018, worth 74.42 trillion yuan (11.08 trillion U.S. dollars), up 112.25 percent and 73.48 percent respectively, data from the People’s Bank of China showed.
Mobile payment dominates the online payment market in rural areas, with total transaction deals and volume making up nearly 95 percent and 97 percent of the online payment totals in rural areas.
Rural areas also reported increasing banking transaction accounts and bank cards.
China had 126,600 rural banking outlets by the end of 2018, with about 1.31 bank serving every 10,000 people in rural areas on average.
BEIJING, April 6 (Xinhua) — The China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation (CFPA) has helped over 30 million people since its establishment 30 years ago.
The foundation has raised over 5.85 billion yuan (871 million U.S. dollars) in cash and in kind as of the end of 2018, according to sources with the foundation.
The CFPA has leveraged the development of local industries to help improve people’s income.
It has spent 11.67 million yuan using e-commerce to help about 16,000 farmers sell their produce since 2015. About 59,000 people have benefited from local tourism development, while over 40.7 billion yuan has been offered as credit to finance farmers.
The “Love Package,” the most popular CFPA program, allows donors to mail care packages to help students in poor areas. The program has received 3.706 million pieces of individual donations and raised 677 million yuan as of the end of the end of 2018.
A ceremony is held to receive the bone ashes of fireman Zhang Chengpeng, who died while fighting a forest fire in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, at Jinan international airport in Jinan, east China’s Shandong Province, April 5, 2019. The ashes of fireman Zhang Chengpeng returned to his hometown of Zouping in Shandong Province on Friday. (Xinhua/Dong Naide)
Civil Aviation Administration of China has not decided whether to take up invitation to be part of task force looking into automated flight control system, according to state media
The FAA is putting together an international team of experts to review the safety of the Boeing 737 MAX after two fatal crashes. Photo: EPA-EFE
China’s aviation regulator has been invited to join the US Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) task force to review the automated flight control system of Boeing’s 737 MAX jets, state media reported on Saturday.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China has not decided whether to accept the invitation, state broadcaster CCTV reported, citing an administration official.
But the official said the regulator would closely follow the investigation into two fatal crashes involving Boeing 737 MAX planes.
The FAA on Wednesday said it was forming an international team to review the safety of the Boeing 737 MAX following the accidents.
China was the first country to ground all Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets after an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed outside Addis Ababa on March 10, killing all 157 people on board.
It was the second crash involving Boeing’s newest model, after 189 people were killed when a Lion Air plane crashed into the Java Sea off Indonesia on October 29.
Noting the similarities between the two accidents, China’s civil aviation regulator ordered domestic airlines to ground all 737 MAX 8 aircraft. It stopped taking applications for Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 airworthiness certification on March 21.After China ordered a dozen carriers to ground their 96 planes – about a quarter of all 737 MAX aircraft in operation globally – authorities in Ethiopia, Indonesia, Mongolia, Morocco and Singapore followed suit, along with airlines in Latin America and South Korea, before it was grounded worldwide.
How every Boeing 737 MAX was grounded in five days
China’s civil aviation regulator has said the plane would only be allowed to resume flights after it is satisfied measures to effectively ensure safety have been taken.
On Wednesday, the FAA said it would set up a Joint Authorities Technical Review (JATR) team to evaluate the safety of the Boeing 737 MAX. Experts from the FAA, Nasa and international aviation authorities would “conduct a comprehensive review of the certification of the automated flight control system on the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft”, the FAA said in a statement
“The JATR team will evaluate aspects of the 737 MAX automated flight control system, including its design and pilots’ interaction with the system, to determine its compliance with all applicable regulations and to identify future enhancements that might be needed,” the statement said.
Image copyrightREUTERSImage caption The victims of a suicide attack pictured in this 2014 photo were falsely identified as Pakistani militants
WhatsApp, India’s most popular messaging platform, has become a vehicle for misinformation and propaganda ahead of the upcoming election. The Facebook-owned app has announced new measures to fight this but experts say the scale of the problem is overwhelming.
India was in the grip of patriotic fervour in early March when WhatsApp groups were flooded with photographs claiming to show proof that unprecedented Indian air strikes in Pakistani territory had been successful.
While India’s government said the 26 February strikes had killed a “large number of militants”, Islamabad insisted there had been no casualties.
But BBC fact-checkers found that the photos – purportedly of dead militants and a destroyed training camp – were old images that were being shared with false captions.
One photo showed a crowd of Muslim women and men gathered around three bodies but those pictured were actually victims of a suicide attack in Pakistan in 2014. A series of photos – of crumbling buildings, piles of debris and bodies in shrouds lying on the ground – were traced to a devastating earthquake in Pakistan-administered Kashmir in 2005.
Image copyrightFACEBOOKImage caption This photo of the aftermath of an earthquake in Kashmir was shared on WhatsApp and FacebookWhatsApp and Facebook have been struggling to curb the impact of “fake news” – messages, photos and videos peddling misleading or outright false information – in elections around the world.
But India’s upcoming election – the world’s largest democratic exercise – is seen as a significant test. Internet usage in rural areas has exploded since the last election in 2014, fuelled by the world’s lowest mobile data prices.
In the lead-up to the vote, Facebook has removed hundreds of accounts and pages for misleading users. WhatsApp, meanwhile, has launched a service to verify reports sent in by users and to study the scale of misinformation on the platform.
What’s the scale of the problem?
India poses a particularly complex problem for Facebook. It is WhatsApp’s largest market – more than 200 million Indians use the app – and a place where users forward more content than anywhere else in the world.
The fact that up to 256 people can be part of a group chat makes it incredibly popular with extended families and large groups of friends. While much of these daily conversations involve people making plans, sharing jokes and catching up – political messages and videos are also shared widely.
Prasanto K Roy, a tech writer, is in a group of more than 100 classmates from his old high school in Delhi. There are Christians, Hindus and Muslims in the group.
“Since 2014, we have been seeing a great deal of polarisation,” he said. “About 10 people are incessantly sending out fake stuff. Some people like me are doing fact checks and telling them but we are being ignored.”
Many Indians were first introduced to the internet through their smartphones. A recent Reuters Institute survey of English-language Indian internet users found that 52% of respondents got news via WhatsApp. The same proportion said they got their news from Facebook.
But content shared via WhatsApp has led to murder. At least 31 people were killed in 2017 and 2018 as a result of mob attacks fuelled by rumours on WhatsApp and social media, a BBC analysis found.
What’s happening before the election?
Both of the main parties – the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the opposition Congress – are exploiting the power of WhatsApp to try to influence India’s 900 million eligible voters.
Both parties have been accused of spreading false or misleading information, or misrepresentation online. On 1 April, Facebook removed 687 pages or accounts that it said were linked to the Congress party for “co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour”.
Pro-BJP Facebook pages – possibly as many as 200 – were also taken down, according to reports, although Facebook did not confirm this. (The social media company did not respond to a request for an explanation).
Media caption India’s elections are the world’s biggest democratic exercise
The BJP began setting up WhatsApp groups en masse around 2016 as it saw an opportunity to reach vast numbers of people, said Shivam Shankar Singh, a former BJP data analyst who worked on regional elections in 2017 and 2018.
By mapping names on electoral rolls against purchased phone numbers and names, it was able to create groups based on certain demographics – such as caste or religion – and target messaging, he said.
Mr Singh, who now works for anti-BJP opposition parties in the state of Bihar, estimated that there were at least 20,000 pro-BJP WhatsApp groups in northern Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.
National party spokesman Gopal Krishna Agarwal denied that the party had any official policy to set up WhatsApp groups – other than to facilitate communication between party workers.
He said supporters and members at a local level were allowed to set up groups, but that these had no official link to the party.
“We don’t want to control it, it’s an open social media platform,” he said.
Why does WhatsApp pose a unique problem?
Indian fact-checking websites like AltNews and Boom frequently debunk political posts shared on Facebook and Twitter – such as reports that a British analyst of Indian elections had called Congress leader Rahul Gandhi “stupid” or that an air force pilot seen as a national hero had joined Congress.
These posts, while not promoted by official party accounts, are often spread widely by unofficial groups or people supporting the parties. They are then sometimes shared by politicians.
“Facebook and Twitter are platforms that do not allow too much secrecy which allows fact-checkers like us to trace who the bad actors are in many of the cases,” said Jency Jacob, the founder of Indian fact-checking site Boom.
The difference with WhatsApp is that posts there are private and protected by encryption. Mr Roy likened it to “something of a black hole”.
“No-one, including WhatsApp itself, gets to see, read, filter or analyse text messages,” he said.
This is unlikely to change – the company said it “deeply believes in people’s ability to communicate privately online”.
Media caption The digital epidemic killing Indians
What has the company done?
Amid the furore over mob lynchings last year, WhatsApp limited the number of times a user can forward a message to five. It also now labels forwarded messages.
The company has launched a nationwide advertising campaign in 10 languages, which it says has reached hundreds of millions of Indians. It also says that it bans two million accounts globally every month that are sending automated spam messages.
Image copyrightREUTERSImage captionWhatsApp has performed street plays in India to spread awareness about misinformation
New privacy settings also allow users to decide who can add them to groups. Previously any WhatsApp user could be added to a group by any other. Now you can choose to only be added automatically to groups by contacts, or by no-one at all.
On 2 April the company announced a new project – Checkpoint – that allows users to send in suspicious messages in English and four Indian languages to WhatsApp for verification. Users are told if the message is true, false, misleading or disputed.
It was reported widely as a new fact-checking service but the company has since emphasised that it mostly aims to “study the misinformation phenomenon” and that not all users will receive a response.
Is it working?
While WhatsApp said its moves had decreased forwarded messages by 25%, fact-checkers at other organisations say fake news is still rampant. And they are frustrated that the same rumours and conspiracy theories that they have already debunked – that the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty have Muslim roots, for example – keep resurfacing.
They say that unless WhatsApp changes its stance on encryption and privacy, the introduction of features similar to those that exist on Facebook – for example, flagging debunked content to users who try to forward it – is impossible.
Image captionThe BBC is yet to receive a response from WhatsApp’s new service
Critics also point out that new rules on the platform won’t affect the huge number of group chats that already exist – giving the party of Prime Minister Modi an advantage.
“The BJP is the only party that has WhatsApp groups at this scale,” Mr Singh said. “The other parties can’t do it now because WhatsApp has changed its policies.”
KARACHI, Pakistan/MUMBAI (Reuters) – Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan blamed India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for “whipping up war hysteria” over claims that India shot down a Pakistani F-16 during a standoff in February, saying the truth is always the best policy.
U.S.-based Foreign Policy magazine, citing U.S. officials, said all of Pakistan’s F-16 combat jets had been accounted for, contradicting an Indian air force assessment that it had shot down one of the jets.
“The truth always prevails and is always the best policy,” Khan said in a Tweet. “BJP’s attempt to win elections through whipping up war hysteria and false claims of downing a Pak F 16 has backfired with US Defence officials also confirming that no F16 was missing from Pakistan’s fleet.”
Nuclear-armed neighbours India and Pakistan engaged in an aerial battle over the disputed region of Kashmir a day after Indian jets crossed over into Pakistan to attack a suspected camp of anti-India militants.
An Indian jet was brought down during the fight and its pilot captured when he ejected on the Pakistani side of the border. He was later released.
India said it too had shot down a Pakistani aircraft and the air force displayed pieces of a missile that it said had been fired by a Pakistani F-16 before it went down.
Foreign Policy said in a report published on Thursday two U.S. defence officials with direct knowledge of the matter said U.S. personnel had done a count of Pakistan’s F-16s and found none missing.
Details of the India-Pakistan air engagement have not been fully provided by either side. If the U.S. report turns out to be true, it would be a further blow to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had said that India had taught Pakistan a lesson, ahead of elections next week.
The BJP is campaigning on a platform of tough national security, especially with regard to arch foe Pakistan. New Delhi blames Pakistan for stoking a 30-year revolt in Muslim-majority Kashmir but Islamabad denies any involvement.
“Firstly, their (Pakistan’s) habit of lying is no secret to the world. Secondly, this is absolutely clear that the roots of terrorism lie in Pakistan and terrorism is cultivated in Pakistan,” he told Reuters.
The success of Indian air strikes on a camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammed militant group in northwestern Pakistan has also been thrown into doubt after satellite images showed little sign of damage.
High-resolution satellite images reviewed by Reuters last month showed that a religious school run by Jaish appeared to be still standing days after India said its warplanes had hit the Islamist group’s training camp on the site and killed a large number of militants.
Pakistan closed its airspace amid the standoff but most commercial air traffic has since resumed and major airports have opened.
Pakistan offered to open one air route on Friday, an Indian government official said, without specifying details and declining to be named as the matter was not public.
An Air India official said on condition of anonymity that Pakistan has opened one of its 11 air routes, from the southern side, adding that the carrier began operations via this route on Friday.
“Pakistan has opened one air route over India on April 4th, it is a north-west bound route,” Mujtaba Baig, spokesman for Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority, told Reuters on Saturday.
An email sent to the Indian Directorate General of Civil Aviation was not immediately answered. Air India did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
BEIJING, April 5 (Xinhua) — China has made headway in promoting the initiative of Internet plus medical and health care, according to the national health authority.
An array of supporting policies have been introduced in areas such as online diagnosis and treatment, Internet hospitals and telemedical services, with 30 measures rolled out to benefit people under the initiative, the National Health Commission said in a statement.
Noting the progress in building a national platform for people’s health information, the commission said 1,273 tertiary hospitals, the highest in China’s three-tier hospital grading system, are able to share their medical service information with each other.
E-health cards, which offer access to personal health information and medical services through a QR code, have been piloted in 28 provincial-level regions, it added.
A specialized network for medical services spanning across the country and online platforms for cloud telemedical services have been established, which enables hospitals to provide telemedical services.
BEIJING, April 5 (Xinhua) — “The air and environment in the cemetery have been notably improved, with less people burning joss paper,” said Wang Fang, a tomb sweeper from Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.
This year’s Tomb Sweeping Day, which falls on Friday, witnesses more changes, as China has made various efforts to reform funeral traditions in recent years, and ecological burial and environmentally friendly tomb sweeping practices are increasingly popular.
GREENER BURIAL
In a tea garden in Hangzhou in east China’s Zhejiang Province, there stands a hidden cemetery where burial plots are built under tea trees in a bid to enlarge its green area as well as conserve land.
“It would be good to return to nature here after I pass away,” said a local resident surnamed Wu.
China has seen progress in ecological burials in recent years, especially in developed cities. The first model ecological cemetery of Beijing has been built in Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, with a green coverage rate of nearly 90 percent.
Currently, ecological burials in first-tier cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, takes up more than 20 percent of the total. It is expected that by 2020, the share of ecological burial across the country reach over 50 percent.
In addition, tomb sweeping practices have become greener. Most tomb sweepers would rather present flowers at tombstones than burn joss paper to pay tribute to their deceased families and friends.
On Tomb Sweeping Day, some cemeteries hold cultural activities, such as calligraphy and painting exhibitions as well as poetry recitals as an alternative to tomb sweeping.
LAND CONSERVATIVE
Besides the “tea garden burial,” other ecological burial methods in China include tree, flower, wall and sea burials.
Replacing traditional tombstones with trees and flower beds, putting urns on shelves in walls or just dropping ashes into the sea requires less or even no land.
“At first people said it was for those in financial difficulties to save money, but as time changes, the popularity of ecological burials have increased,” said Zhao Quansheng, manager of a Yinchuan-based cemetery.
“A customer told us that his father voluntarily asked for an ecological burial to conserve land,” Zhao said.
Non-profit cemeteries are also thriving in places of separate burial traditions. In Yishui County, east China’s Shandong Province, 110 non-profit cemeteries have been built, leading to conservation of large areas of land that otherwise would be utilized for burial sites.
Xue Feng, Party secretary of Yishui, said it used to take about 20 to 27 hectares of land to accommodate all the private tombs in the county, but now it only needs 10 percent of that.
LESS MONEY
China has beefed up funeral infrastructure and public services, with the number of funeral parlours and cemeteries reaching 1,760 and 1,420, respectively.
Since 2009, the Ministry of Civil Affairs has pushed forward fee reduction in basic public funeral services as well as other preferential policies, benefiting low-income groups. For example, commercial cemeteries in Chongqing, Gansu and Ningxia were required to set aside part of their burial sites as non-profits for those with financial difficulties.
“Now the whole funeral is free, including the urn and burial site, which is a great help for households with low incomes like us,” said Yuan Li, a rural resident from Yishui, where funeral services have been free of charge since 2017.
Xue said the fee-reduction policy could save the public nearly 200 million yuan (about 30 million U.S. dollars) annually.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs issued a pilot plan for funeral reform in 2017, and released guidelines with another 14 authorities on further reform in 2018.
“The funeral reforms help encourage fine and up-to-date practices and trends, and make contributions to land and ecological conservation,” said Ma Guanghai, sociology professor of Shandong University. “It is an important aspect of social progress.”
Students lay flowers to pay tribute to revolutionary martyrs during a campaign at the Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in Beijing, capital of China, April 4, 2019. China has kicked off a campaign to promote paying tribute to revolutionary martyrs as Tomb-sweeping Day draws near. The campaign is aimed at combining educational activities with paying tribute. Tomb-sweeping Day, also known as Qingming Festival, falls on April 5 this year. It is a traditional Chinese holiday where people pay tribute to deceased family and friends. (Xinhua/Zhang Chenlin)
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 